She pointed out that 39 percent of the global population—some 2.8 billion people—are now on the Internet. But an even larger number—73 percent or 5.2 billion people—have mobile phones, of which 40 percent were smartphones. Internet and smartphone adoption continue to grow, but at slowing rates, which makes sense since the numbers are already so large. Later, she noted that two-thirds of Americans now have smartphones, saying that the emergence of people connected 24/7 with mobile devices has been "the big 20-year change."

Among the trends that I thought stood out: Meeker suggested that this year, for the first time, the average adult in the U.S. would spend more time with digital media on their mobile device than on other devices such as desktops and laptops, with mobile use accounting for 2.8 hours a day out of a total of 5.6 hours per day. She still believes that relative to time spent, print accounts for too much of the advertising spend, while mobile accounts for too little: overall of all media, mobile consumes 24 percent of the time, but gets only 8 percent of the revenue. (Note that TV still leads both categories by a wide margin, with 37 percent of the time spend and 41 percent of the revenue.)

Among the future trends she was most interested in are new forms of mobile advertising, incluing Pinterest's Cinematic Pin, Facebook's Carousel Ad, Vessel's 5-second video ads, and Google's local inventory ads. As I've heard from several speakers at conferences lately, she talked about how vertical video ads seem to be doing much better that traditional horizontal ads in the mobile context.

I was interested in her promotion of new mobile tools for the enterprise, such as business messaging platform Slack, payments companies Square and Stripe, data analytics provider Domo, document signing tool DocuSign, sales tools such as Intercom and Gainsight, customer service provider Directly, and HR services provider Zenefits.

She talked about how messaging products were becoming increasingly important not only by themselves but as cross-platform operating systems that become hubs for additional services.

In content, she talked about the increased use of video and live gaming, as well as an increasing consumption of user-generated content, particularly photos and video shared on social media.

I also noted that Meeker focused on technology and jobs for the first time, noting that in the U.S., jobs grew 1.7 times faster than the population from 1948 to 2000. But since then, the population has grown 2.4 times faster than jobs. She noted that high-skilled or knowledge=based jobs have doubled since 1983, but other jobs have grown just 1.3 times. And she spent a lot of time talking about how online marketplaces and platforms—from e-commerce sites like eBay and Etsy to service companies like Airbnb and Uber—are changing the way many people work, letting them find supplementary income and flexibility.

On a global basis, she talked about how China has become the largest Internet market, while India is now the third largest and the one with the largest number of new Internet users and often the second largest market for global Internet companies.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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